The collaborative practice of Sadia Pineda Hameed and Beau W Beakhouse is a technical talisman, a blueprint for navigating unsettled pasts and future histories, a linguistic shapeshifter. Currently based in the Ebbw Valley in Wales, the duo have worked together since 2016, building up a body of work that morphs across media: from performance- lectures to radio broadcasts, DIY publishing to green woodworking. In the blending of anti- colonial tools and tactics of resistance with alternative fabrication techniques, their work proposes autonomous forms of communication, knowledge-sharing, and craft.

“When you’re trying to build worlds, you’re always lacking the language that you need,” suggests Pineda Hameed. “It’s both enough and never quite enough. We are constantly seeking out other methods of making that language.” So far, these methods have taken the form of a sci-fi green-screen room complete with hovering Filipino board games (it resonates like spalting wood, 2021), a future-rustic iteration of the same game rooted in green woodworking (adzing planes like waning moons, 2022) and metallic anti-tools that refuse to reveal their function (Ornaments of Prospect, 2023). An interest in the generative potential of play and speculative fiction strategies suffuse their work with a kind of corrosive logic: each project suggests an operating system that dissolves just before it’s rendered legible.

One project bleeds into the next as the duo reapproach a subject from different angles and materials, exploding the capacities of its meaning. Recent projects have focused on the Filipino board game sungka: a strategy game comparable to chess in which players take and deposit seeds in hand-hewn pits. Like the generative capacity of storytelling detailed in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the game itself becomes a vessel for layered and collaborative world-making. But in the Filipino context, sungka holds a tension between its colonial heritage and its capacities as an anti-colonial tool for communicating the unspeakable.

A redwood falls in a Welsh arboretum. What to do with a death that is also a kind of life, a gesture against its own colonial capture? In adzing planes like waning moons, the sungka board arises again, this time from a green woodworking technique used by Beakhouse’s family, in tribute to the fallen tree. In green woodworking, which manipulates unseasoned wood without power tools, there is no quality control; the log splits as it likes, and imperfections are exalted instead of scrubbed out. “Between the contaminated worlds of capitalism and a mutated nature, we wanted to settle the score through a reparative repurposing of the wood,” Pineda Hameed and Beakhouse explain.

The pair of seats framing the board explicates this process through language: one bench reveals the artists’ secret mission to salvage the redwood from the arboretum, while the other details the exacting methods of extraction that constituted its original capture. Etched upon the sungka table, somehow split between these two worlds, is a manual for future disruptions. “Displace acculturate and liberate stolen trees / make tools to make tools in rustic futures” snakes around the board in a burned-out typeface that merges baroque flourish with high-tech mysticism.

In Ornaments of Prospect, the duo’s latest project, these tools got sharper while their frameworks became more opaque. Focusing on the filipino bolo, a device historically used for agriculture and war, they present the tool here only through its offcuts. Realized in unevenly treated metal–brandishing an oil-slick sci-fi sheen at parts, rusting red at others – it becomes a mysterious artifact that refuses to reveal its functionality.

Like an inverted broken hammer theory that ghosts legible meaning through its absence, the bolo exists here as a haunted byproduct. Compared to Pineda Hameed and Beakhouse’s previous projects, there is a defiance to the tool’s inscrutability. It indicates a world-making process that does not, as with the sungka boards, emerge from a porous invitation to play, but from a sharp right to refusal. “We’re interested in shifting what’s necessary in steps of production,” they suggest. “What happens when you have no fluency for a tool, no language to decipher it?”

In many ways, toolmaking is a language already; both technologies offer ways of instrumentalising knowledge of the world around us. By reconfiguring tools and games as sites for refusal and collective meaning-making, Pineda Hameed and Beakhouse open up new anti-colonial tactics for world-making, where any possible future always carries with it a (re)reading of the past, as generative as it is necessary.